A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Although we marry "for better for worse, for richer for poorer," this study is among the first to demonstrate that the personality traits of the spouse we choose may play a role in determining whether our chosen career makes us richer or poorer. - Gerry Everding via Spouse's personality influences career success, study finds.
Why is it that when people are too stressed they are often grouchy, grumpy, nasty, distracted or forgetful? Researchers from the Brain Mind Institute BMI at EPFL have just highlighted a fundamental synaptic mechanism that explains the relationship between chronic stress and the loss of social skills and cognitive impairment. When triggered by stress, an [...]
Spending less time on the sofa lengthens "telomeres"-the caps on chromosomes which protect the genetic code inside. The best anti-ageing technique could be standing up, scientists believe, after discovering that spending more time on two feet protects DNA. A study found that too much sitting down shortens telomeres, the protective caps which sit at the [...]
Do you like brain science? Sure, we all do. It looks cool, it sounds exciting, it tickles our intellect, and it promises to solve all of life’s questions. Why do we do the things we do? We've all seen the pulsating red, yellow and blue brain scans from laboratories of people doing any number of things [...]
Our brains might be adapting to an emoticon-filled world by processing them differently. Today emoticons are so pervasive that behavioral science has taken an active interest in how people use them. Among the evidence (recently surveyedby Roni Jacobson at the great new Science of Usblog), we find that women use more emoticons than men, that using [...]
Food companies are advertising products such as Kit Kats and Coco Pops to children because they are classified as healthy by their own nutritional standards. A NSW Cancer Council analysis found that 63 per cent of food that appeared in television advertisements was considered unhealthy under Food Standards Australia New Zealand nutrient profiling. The analysis [...]
Did you know that the information provided by a salesperson wearing a red sweater seems more accurate than information provided by a shop assistant in blue? Or that women are more likely to be interested in a service they hear advertised by a man with a creaky voice than a woman with a creaky voice? [...]
Mental illness is not a communicable disease, but there’s a strong body of evidence that suicide is still contagious. Publicity surrounding a suicide has been repeatedly and definitively linked to a subsequent increase in suicide, especially among young people. Analysis suggests that at least 5 percent of youth suicides are influenced by contagion. - Margot Sanger-Katz [...]
It’s predominantly because people evolved to respond intuitively to all sorts of threats, rather than think about them too much. To think about them would require time and effort, so it was eminently more efficient to respond to the fear first and think about it later. Fear can have a powerful effect on our behaviour—motivating [...]
New Australian research suggests that consuming A1 milk can adversely affect the gastrointestinal tract compared with A2 milk. Forty-one men and women were recruited into the double-blind, randomised cross-over study run by Curtin University in Perth over eight weeks. For two weeks, participants underwent a 'washout' where they cut out dairy from their diets. This was followed by two [...]
